A botched FAFSA rollout threatens students' college ambitions

This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Subscribe to their newsletters at ckbe.at/newsletters.

Christian Rojas Linares can't finish his financial aid forms because he's been covered in error messages. The New York City high school senior even received incorrect emails telling him that his application was canceled.

In Philadelphia, Yasmeen Mutan had better luck: Finishing the form only took her an hour. But the federal government has taken so long to process and share his data that, four months later, he still doesn't know how much he will receive in financial aid. Without that, he can't decide where to go to college. And that means he can't apply for state financial aid either.

“I log in every other day, just to make sure I don't miss anything,” Mutan said. “I just don't know what to do.”

With college decision deadlines approaching, thousands of high school seniors have been stuck in limbo due to the botched launch of the new Free Application for Federal Student Aid. The so-called Better FAFSA was supposed to simplify students' receipt of financial aid. However, the mistakes have been numerous and serious enough that high school counselors and college access advocates now fear that promising students in the class of 2024 will end up not attending college.

As of late March, just over a third of high school seniors had successfully submitted the FAFSA, according to data tracked by the National College Attainment Network. In previous years, almost half of seniors would have already done so. Students who complete the FAFSA are much more likely to go to college, so low completion rates raise concerns about the long-term impact on this year's graduating class.

And the decline tracked by the network is much larger in schools that serve many low-income students and students of color.

Closing routes to financial aid creates “huge problems,” said CJ Powell, advocacy director for the National Association for College Admission Counseling, especially for students whose families have fewer resources. These students, often students of color and children of immigrants, are especially reliant on Pell grants and other aid to pay for college. And when they delay college, Powell said, they are less likely to attend.

“People leaving keeps me up at night,” said Bill Wozniak, vice president of communications and student services at INvestED, a nonprofit that promotes postsecondary education in Indiana. “I worry about people who are more vulnerable and do everything right and it doesn't work.”

Cascade of problems with the new FAFSA form

It wasn't supposed to be like this.

Completing the FAFSA is the gateway to grants, scholarships, and subsidized loans that make college affordable for millions of students. But for years, students and parents found the form complicated and stressful.

In 2020, Congress passed legislation to simplify the form, with far fewer questions and more family financial information pulled directly from tax returns already held by the federal government. But the transition turned out to be much more technically difficult than anticipated and fell to a U.S. Department of Education that was also tasked with overseeing complicated student debt forgiveness programs, according to numerous reports.

The launch of the new form was delayed, and when it finally became available in late December, it was plagued by technical glitches.

Students from mixed-status families, in which one or both parents do not have a Social Security number, faced some of the biggest obstacles. The workarounds these students have used for years, such as entering only zeros instead of a Social Security number, no longer worked. And for weeks these students (most of them U.S. citizens) had no way to add their parents' financial information.

In March, the education department announced that the problem was fixed. But many students still have problems even when trying to verify their parents' identity.

That's the case for several of Danielle Insel's students at the Urban Assembly Mathematics and Science Institute for Young Women in Brooklyn. “They are still going back and forth to have their parents' identities recognized so they can finish the parent section of the FAFSA,” said Insel, the school's director of postsecondary preparation.

“After five, six, eight tries, they want to give up,” he said. Students already tell him, sometimes jokingly and sometimes less so: “I'm not going to go to college, I'm not going to get financial aid.”

“It's demoralizing, frustrating, and yes, I can see it having a direct link to a decline in enrollment. If not enrollment, definitely enrollment,” she added.

In group chats and message boards, college advisors exchange tips to help students overcome technical obstacles. Sometimes they can look like a retro gaming cheat code.

On a recent afternoon at West High School in Denver, Denver Scholarship Foundation college advisor Federico Rangel shared a trick with student René Torres, who was getting an error message every time he tried to add his parents to his account , a necessary step.

“You press the rewind button twice,” Rangel told Torres. “It should take us back to the original page and then we can move on. “Then it should allow us to do the math.”

At first the trick didn't work, but then Torres got a new screen for the first time.

“Oh,” Rangel said. “You have the identity verification page.”

“It's a step in the right direction.”

Many students do not have financial aid packages.

The federal education department has also been slow to share student data with colleges and recently announced it would reprocess many forms to correct discrepancies in tax data. The Chronicle of Higher Education reported that college financial aid officials are encountering many errors, leading to more delays and frustrations. Colleges don't want to send out financial aid packages that they then have to change.

In a typical year, students would receive financial aid packages along with college acceptance letters and have weeks or months to compare offers and weigh their options. This year, students are receiving acceptance letters from colleges, but in most cases they are not receiving financial aid awards.

“Students decide where to go and whether to go on the back of these award letters,” said Bill DeBaun, senior director of data and strategic initiatives at the National College Attainment Network. “You're looking at these various paths without having any idea which ones are accessible to you.”

For counselors, this means that they are still working with upperclassmen instead of beginning to work with juniors on their college essays as they normally would. It's harder to hold in-person “fill out the FAFSA” events when families may leave frustrated. And keeping track of changes in deadlines has become its own headache.

For students, not being able to decide on a college can delay or complicate other decisions.

Mark Stulberg, director of college counseling at Newark's Lincoln Park High School, said students' attempts to secure housing, internships and other aspects of college life for next year are “kind of on pause right now.”

Lincoln Park is part of the North Star Academy charter school system, where the majority of students are black and come from low-income families. Schools emphasize college attendance starting in kindergarten.

This year, 85% of students completed the FAFSA, a rate well above the state average but still 5 to 10 percentage points lower than in a typical year for North Star.

Stulberg said teachers and counselors are doing everything they can to encourage students to be patient and view delays as a relatively small obstacle in a long journey. Until now, the families continue with the process.

However, he worries that some of his students “will have worked for the last 10 to 12 years to prepare themselves to be successful in college” only to choose another path that will not prepare them for success the way higher education does.

Counselors tell students: Focus on long-term goals

Wozniak in Indiana said his team of college counselors, who staff hotlines and events, want parents and students to know they are not alone and it is not their fault. Many colleges and state financial aid systems are pushing back deadlines to accommodate the delays, and financial aid offers will come.

Powell said counselors can help students apply for other scholarships while they wait, or go over how to read a financial aid offer so they can compare options in a shorter period of time.

Rojas Linares tries to remain optimistic. He has been accepted into several public and private colleges, although he is in limbo until he can figure out his Pell grants, work-study, federal loans and his scholarship through the New York State Tuition Assistance Program. .

“How much longer will we have to wait for financial aid results?” Rojas Linares asked himself. “I just hope this all ends so we don't have to stress anymore.”

Mutan is determined to go to college, but she may end up waiting a year if she doesn't receive information about financial aid soon, she said. Her parents are Palestinian immigrants who mostly speak Arabic and her father provides the sole income for the household. She doesn't want to put financial pressure on her parents and she doesn't want to go into debt.

“I want to be able to pay for college and the FAFSA is a big part of that,” he said.

chalk beat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.

Related:
Igniting student curiosity through career exploration
The exposure gap is blocking students' ability to envision future careers
For more college readiness news, visit eSN's Innovative Teaching Hub